Full name, Nicholas Rozsa; born April 18, 1907, in Budapest, Hungary; died ofcomplications following a stroke, July 27, 1995, in Los Angeles, CA. Composer. Miklos Rozsa was one of the most celebrated film composers of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. He was a musical child prodigy, taking up the violin at the ageof five. His father sent him to the University of Budapest to study chemistry, but he enrolled in the Music Conservatory at the same time. Rozsa later studied composition and violin in Leipzig, Germany. In the late 1930s Rozsa metthe Hungarian producer Alexander Korda, who commissioned him to write a score for the 1937 film Knight without Armor, starring Marlene Dietrich. Rozsa won the Academy Award for best score for the films Spellbound (1945), A DoubleLife (1947), and Ben-Hur (1957). He scored many films, including The Thief ofBaghdad (1940)--the first film to have its own soundtrack album-- The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), El Cid (1952), Time afterTime (1979) and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). Rozsa also composed chambermusic, which was performed in Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic, and was the author of an autobiography, A Double Life (1982).
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